The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  Once the astronauts splashed down, celebrations erupted like never before on NASA Road 1. Henry Pohl just wanted to get home to his family but found himself bumper to bumper with happily honking cars and roving bands of revelers. Once he’d navigated home, Pohl loaded up his family and took off for his parents’ south Texas ranch; it was time for fresher air. Even the cattle would give his nose a welcome and homespun break from days of cigarettes and stale coffee. He wanted to lie back and regard the night skies the old-fashioned way.

  Huntsville, too, rejoiced. Von Braun rode on the shoulders of city leaders, up the courthouse steps for a not-quite-impromptu speech. Once the church bells and air-raid sirens quieted, he didn’t make any promises but suggested, “Maybe one of these days we’ll even have a man on Mars.”

  The astronauts had to delay any celebration. NASA quarantined them, just in case the mission had picked up a deadly microscopic stowaway. Faget’s “receiving laboratory,” meant to properly store and protect lunar material, now became a facility that also aimed to protect Earth from possibly harmful alien organisms. The extreme caution turned out to be overkill—the Moon, as expected, is completely lifeless. Some engineers found the caution ridiculous, but the price of being wrong was too great.

  Once on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the astronauts boarded an Airstream, and the sleek trailer became their quarantined home for the next three weeks. They read books, scribbled their thoughts, and played board games with one another. As awkward as that might sound, especially for three humans who’d already spent a nonstop week together, these lodgings greatly expanded their space and comfort from the Apollo command module. Engineers and medical officials held various debriefing meetings with the astronauts through a glass wall. Doctors monitored the astronauts’ vital signs every day until they were deemed pathogen-free. For additional weeks, many packets of film, Moon rocks, and other goodies sat like the world’s most exciting Christmas presents until everyone from the medical community felt sure they were uninfected. Various animals (including oysters, houseflies, quail, and mice) were injected with lunar material and monitored for any signs of illness. (Agitated swimming of the planarians provided the only reaction to lunar dust, but who could really blame them?)33

  With the primary mission accomplished, the engineers ramped up thoughts of “What’s next?” But NASA had no collective, compelling answer. It seemed that the nation’s new president, Richard Nixon, would curtail NASA’s budget even more rapidly than Johnson had. Like so many fireworks lined up on the 3rd of July, another nine Apollo missions sat ready, pointing at the Moon, with increasingly more scientific work in each one. But what stretched beyond that? Some top administrators wanted to push for an actual Moon colony and a trip to Mars. Others, like von Braun, read the tea leaves and recommended a more modest and practical path, something that could at least sustain decent funding: an affordable Earth-orbiting laboratory, for one, and Faget’s winged, reusable shuttle craft for another.

  My father had transitioned into an advisory role by this time, focused on the future of mission planning. Did that mean the later Apollo missions, or immediately after Apollo, or well beyond? “All of the above,” he says. He recalls a trip to Grumman’s headquarters in New York, where they manufactured the lander. NASA asked Grumman to modify the lander’s design to allow for stowing more Moon samples. Scientists were already making great demands of Moon rocks, so bringing back more made good sense. The trip went well, and Grumman agreed to lose one of the batteries, making room for more rocks.

  Despite the triumph of the lander, Grumman, like other space-reliant businesses, housed some nervous employees after the Apollo 11. The majority of the space program’s four hundred thousand people worked within one of fifty thousand different contracting companies. The five largest space contactors were all ranked within the top forty of the U.S. economy, each doing between two billion and three billion dollars of annual business. More than one hundred of these companies had prepared special press kits to promote their roles in the Moon shot, but with NASA budgets falling and the end of Apollo already in sight, many engineers approached abrupt changes.34

  Most of NASA busily prepared the next Apollo launch, and by mid-November, another Saturn V rocket, with the next Moon-bound ship, sat ready to go. NASA sometimes rewarded engineers by flying them to Florida to witness a launch in person. Mac Henderson had spent his first years at the agency studying the first eight minutes of an Apollo launch, planning for every possible problem and contingency during a Saturn V’s first two stages. What calamities would cause it to abort, pulling the crew capsule away from the massive tube of explosive fuel, and what calamities could be allowed to ride to orbit? But after several successful launches and with robust staffing in Mission Control, they rewarded this behind-the-lights engineer with a spot in the spectator stands that morning.

  “I was a young fellow,” Henderson says, and the idea of a launch was especially exciting. On launch day, clouds rolled into the Cape and thickened for a long stay, but NASA decided to proceed. The Saturn V roared aloft, as sound waves buffeted the crowd, and then disappeared into the low cloud cover. About a half-minute later, bright flashes lit the sky. “You couldn’t see the vehicle,” Henderson recalls. “But you could see the lightning.” Uh oh. “Then the loudspeakers come on and they’re saying, ‘Hey, there’s been a problem, we need y’all to leave.’ ” Despite no sign of lightning earlier that morning, the ionized exhaust from the Saturn rocket acted as a perfect lightning rod, inviting two strikes within a minute.

  Staff quickly herded the assembled guests onto waiting buses. If the Apollo rocket was going to have a major problem, they wanted these people to get away from the launch complex. Henderson, the expert on early-launch troubles, felt helpless boarding a tourist bus. He was missing the one minute of the Apollo era that needed him most.35

  In the command module, the astronauts rocketed onward with no electrical power. They deduced they’d been hit by lightning, but they were injury free. The engineers in Mission Control weren’t sure what had happened and weren’t sure what to do. They’d lost contact with Apollo in a burst of static. “The whole place just lit up,” a young engineer named John Aaron reported. “I mean, all the [warning] lights came on. So instead of being aids to tell you what went wrong, the lights were absolutely no help at all.” And then there was data like nothing the engineers had ever seen—Apollo’s instruments sent a stream of gibberish to Mission Control.

  Should they abort? The Apollo craft’s guidance system had lost its bearings completely, but the Saturn rocket soldiered on, with its brain still awake and keeping the mission on track. As the engineers watched the mission gaining altitude on a textbook schedule, they’d trust the Saturn V and for now try to somehow bring sanity to Apollo’s instruments.

  Aaron quickly saw a pattern in the gibberish. Incredibly, he recalled this odd fingerprint from a trial run. He’d had no active role in that earlier day, in what was called a “pad test,” but he obsessively observed. When the gibberish emerged, the only thing that had fixed it, in that test, was workers at the Cape resetting one modest switch. He sent word up the chain of command, but nobody recognized the “SCE” switch—not his Mission Control bosses, and once they regained contact with the crew, not the astronauts.v Aaron, all of twenty-three years old, carefully told them where to find it (there were hundreds of switches lining the Apollo command module); soon the Apollo crew compartment powered up and regained its senses.

  Engineers had actually worried a great deal about lightning and had taken significant steps to protect their tall stacks of Saturn stages and spacecraft modules. But instead of focusing on the eight minutes of ascent, where there was little to be done, they had reasonably worried more about the weeks that an Apollo mission spent crawling to the launch pad and waiting through myriad tests and preparations. Engineers who focused on electrical systems look back on lightning as one of their toughest challenges. They installed a specially designed “amp trap” on t
he launch towers to help absorb direct hits, and though it’s difficult to find in photos, thin wires hung above the waiting tower and rocket to help channel any lightning strike to the ground. Nonetheless, direct and damaging strikes hit more than one waiting mission; Florida’s frequent thunderstorms could not restrain their electric curiosity for these strange and temporary towers rising from the flat landscape.36

  Once Apollo 12 had safely orbited the Earth, NASA took stock. They’d lost a couple of temperature sensors, but everything else seemed to be working. Lightning had sent enough current to power a small city through the rocket and parts of the vehicle, but Saturn and the tough little spaceship had shaken it off. Tape-based computer memory would have been fried, but with its hard-wired version, Apollo’s computer program was unruffled. When looking back from our modern bureaucracies, the next step feels inconceivable. Their ship had lost power, and they had nearly aborted the liftoff after a lightning strike. Yet, NASA considered completing a trip to the Moon and back. In its typical fashion, the agency took individual delegations of duty as gospel, and the flight director of this mission, Gerry Griffin, would make the decision.

  “We were allowed to do what we were good at,” he said. But there were massive PR considerations, with congressional funding at risk if the mission failed, right? “We had checks, sure. But nobody from headquarters was trying to second-guess.” The engineers would look over the data and make the most reasonable decision, measuring the mission goals versus the instrument readings and possible risks. After about an hour of collecting information from each system and subsystem, the decision seemed obvious. “We finally figured out we had to do a re-entry anyway,” he says, noting the most dangerous part of any mission after the launch. “So, let’s go to the Moon.”37

  Compared to the first landing, the second one was smooth and simple. Initially, when the lander departed for descent, the astronauts reported it was bucking like a wild horse—the thing just seemed incredibly sensitive. This turned out to be a slight simulation problem. The lander’s simulation program had trained the astronauts for a much more sluggish craft. But soon, they had the hang of the real thing, and the guidance computer used a new and improved descent technique. Not only did it turn off the docking radar this time (focusing purely on the landing) but the computer also now compared the speed at each time step to what calculations had predicted. It then made subtle corrections along the way, and Apollo 12 stuck its landing on target.38

  My father has always kept a framed black-and-white photograph featured prominently in my parents’ home. “This is my favorite,” he says. “It tells my whole NASA story.” With the lander in the background, the photograph shows astronaut Charles Conrad Jr. from Apollo 12 standing near an unmanned Surveyor lander built by Hughes Aircraft, where my father had worked to put the first American hardware on the Moon. The astronauts took careful readings from the Surveyor’s skin. Its subtle pock-marks gave the best measure yet for the frequency and size of micro-meteoroids striking the Moon. The “old” probe (it had landed two years prior) showed some minor space weathering, but overall, its lack of major blemishes suggested that the Moon’s surface was a relatively safe place (see Figure 12.3).

  figure 12.3 Fancy meeting you here. The unmanned Surveyor 3 probe receives a visitor, astronaut Charles Conrad Jr., with Apollo 12’s lunar module in the background. (NASA photograph.)

  With the third and fourth set of human boots on the Moon, the astronauts prepared to deploy a newly designed television camera. Now the audiences at home would get a properly crisp picture of Moon adventures, with the red, white, and blue of the American flag, and gold-colored foil crinkled around the lander. However, when struggling to set it up, an astronaut accidentally pointed its sensitive electric eye at the unfiltered sun, rendering it blind in an instant. Networks scrambled with back-up plans. NBC had studio actors in astronaut garb pace out what should be happening on this second Moon walk. CBS, following on their leading coverage of the first Moon shot, had a more elaborate back-up. Using a grainy camera, fake moonscape, and marionette astronauts, they simulated “live” footage of the excursion. The footage was fairly convincing, and some viewers assumed they were watching the real thing.39

  This brings up an uncomfortable point. At a time when special effects were taking a great leap forward and when many Americans had started to question technocracy, charges of the landings being faked were somewhat predictable. Many people today might assume such conspiracy theories to be a contemporary phenomenon. Perhaps they feed on our era’s unique psychology, buoyed by the internet, growing in number once an event recedes into the past. But in fact, doubts were widespread in 1969. Engineer Wesley Ratcliff recalls gathering family and friends at his home for the landings. “We had so many people tell me we were wasting our time,” he says now. “And that it was just a big production.” Likewise, Huntsville scientist Tom Parnell tells a story of traveling late one night by car, not far from Huntsville. He pulled into a rural filling station and saw television coverage from one of the Moon landings. He watched some of it there in the station office, waiting to pay for gas. The attendant walked in and looked at the screen. “You don’t think they’re really up there,” the attendant said, “do you?”40

  I’ve always known that my father’s own mother never believed in the missions. No matter that her son worked long hours at NASA; this woman of the swamplands knew that the Moon was part of heaven and mortal men just could not go there. She passed away a few years before the landing. I long assumed this poignant story was somewhat unique to our family, but it wasn’t uncommon at all. Many Apollo engineers had extended family members, especially from older generations, who just refused to believe we could step on the Moon. The big screen scenes of 2001 looked better than NASA’s grainy, flickering footage anyway, so why couldn’t it all be faked? It’s easy to imagine a doubter from late 1969, rolling their eyes. Oh, you pointed the new, better camera at the sun, did you? Mm-hmm. What a convenient story.

  The Apollo 12 mission returned safely on schedule, but NASA had watched American interest plummet. Camera snafus aside, the launch coincided with more bad news: the breaking story of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, with its shocking photographs taken much closer to home. As if American soldiers killing unarmed civilians wasn’t shocking enough, audiences watched another emerging hostility, as a new White House administration openly pointed fingers at specific segments of society. Earlier in November, Vice President Spiro Agnew had attacked “an effete corps of intellectual snobs,” including professors, hippies, and war protestors. The media, too, were just a “small and unelected elite,” he said, at odds with real America.41

  After a fleeting moment of unity, humans seemed to return to a natural, tribal outlook as they digested NASA’s achievement. Counterculture writer Norman Mailer saw 1969 as the year his team definitively lost their war with the squares. He wrote that his kind were an “abominable army.” He wrote that he wanted to scream at his bar mate, “You’ve been drunk all summer, and they have taken the moon!” On the other end of the spectrum, archconservative Ayn Rand simultaneously wrote that “Apollo and Dionysus represent the fundamental conflict of our age.” She saw these not as “floating abstractions” at war, but as concrete and contrasting ambitions: one a technological temple at the Cape, and the other writhing in drug-fueled lust at Woodstock, New York.

  The counterculture itself was fragmenting by December of 1969. After sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll had offered a collaborative vision in Woodstock, version 2.0 fell to violent mayhem at Altamont Pass near San Francisco. With bad trips, dozens of beatings, a drowning, and a knifing victim dragged before the horrified Rolling Stones, many of the three hundred thousand in attendance left wondering if the years ahead would have room for peace, love, or moonbeams.42

  Republican minority leader Everett Dirksen, a veteran of World War I, was called the “Wizard of Ooze” for his memorable oratory. Late in 1969, he proposed to his congressional colleagues a wholly positive a
nd uniting gesture: The nation, he said, should henceforth recognize each July 20th as a national holiday. America should celebrate what was arguably the century’s signature achievement. But his “Moon Day” idea failed to excite other legislators, and it disappeared without a vote.43

  * * *

  i We now know the less positive stories of the Soviet space program from archival material freed during and after the glasnost period of the 1980s.

  ii They risked a condition known as “gimbal lock,” where two of a craft’s three gyroscopes become twinned, essentially removing one full dimension of awareness.

  iii The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, originally signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, set a framework for international space law. It barred participants from installing weapons of mass destruction in space, establishing military bases in orbit or on the Moon, or claiming sovereignty over another celestial object.